Well I’ve been working steadily on ps_derailed over the holidays getting it up to visual standard for RC1 release. Most of the updates involves some new and redone brushwork, a fairly major retexture, and a handfull of skybox props made by me and Schmung from the FAS team. Schmung is responsible for the awesom

e crane which really looks nice as it hangs over the map in a skybox.

Here’s an update to the parallaxing background test I was doing before. I added a bullet manager, some collisions and “camera code” to keep the view on the player.  I also went out and bought a xbox360 controller so I can start coding for its inputs and it is very nice.

Made a parallaxing background manager that takes in a vector from something (in this case the player) and alters the background.

I ran into trouble with the math  when I wanted to get extremely small parallax scale values.

The art is done by Shea L.

I havent had time to map much lately because of school but the nice thing about being away from a map for so long is your mind keeps subconciously working on it. I had no lack of ideas for this map.

The progressive spawns are completely redone and are moved a bit further away from the center cap point. There is now about 200% more upper level sniper and support spots. There has been a lot of re-texturing to give it a more industrial and unified feel. The texture theme before was a little all over the place. HDR exposure is reduced and the lighing is getting there, it still needs some more incremental changes though.

The shots here show off the redone areas and sniper points over the 3rd cap point. Note that the 3rd cap point goes into the garage and is now much more heavily fortified, it should be easier to defend despite the increase of sniper points focused on it.

Crossfire has had a few issues relating to holding flags. Before there was a flag that was fairly difficult to defend because it had roughly 270 degrees of overwatches focused on it.

I’ve moved that flag into a nearby warehouse and opened up a few more paths towards this warehouse. It should be much easier to defend now.

I will probably be doing another update for “the ghetto” flag to make it easier to defend.

I’ve also added a sewer system under the park area, hopefully this will make it easier for blue to hold as well as make it easier for red to cap.

Finished up Akumamatata the other night. This would be the first full library and game I managed to make without having to constantly resort to a book or reference somewhere. I’m finally starting to get a grip on XNA, at least the 2D portion of it.

Over the next while I’ll be doing a handful of 2D projects this time with original content drawn by me and some friends.

Anyways here’s a vid of Akumamatata, no download link of course for obvious reasons

Here’s a map I’m working on for FAS. It attempts to do an outdoor forest scene in Source which is a little rough.

I learned the value of modulation blend textures from this map, the quality increase from using them on your terrain blends is huge. The tree model is about my 4th attempt at doing an evergreen, I’m still not entirely happy with it but it’s improving every time which is good.

As you can see I thought of a better name for the game than “Akumas Quest”

Since the last version I’ve done the following:

-Added in collisions

-Added in an enemy and enemy manager class

-Added in scoring

-Added in a very hacked on FSM for the start menu

I’ve learned a ton from this project.  One thing in particular is after starting to pass a lot of classes around it became very apparent why it’s good to make an interface for a class you only have one instance of then register it as a service.  I’ve heard this is called the singleton pattern.  Definitely seems to keep the code less messy since a lot of my classes need usually one or 2 things from another class.

One other thing to note is next time I do a game, I’ll make sure I have a very well thought finite state machine in place first. Trying to implement a decent FSM after the game was started proved to be too much of a burden.

You may notice there’s some diagnostic text in the top left, it’s telling you what state Akuma is in, whether a collision succeeded and whether the irrelevant enemies were removed from memory.

I still have to add some more gameplay code.  The point of the game will be that Akuma must protect his stash of pizza and comics on the left side of the screen from increasingly difficult waves of enemies.

I’ve spent some free time int he summer studying C# and XNA in preparation for school and just for the fun of game development. Years ago I did some introductory classes in programming at college, mostly in c++.  I did well gradewise but all the exercises were about fundementals like making linked lists and pointer management, basically all console programs. I coulnd’t quite grasp how that would come together to form a useful windows program, much less a game.

After getting back into programming through C#/XNA I’ve managed to stay a lot more motivated than before. The language has had the effect of making c++ more understandable. I’m looking forward to really getting into the guts of the SourceSDK eventually.

So I have today some video footage of what is actually my first 2 projects:

The first is LemurLib, a 2D platforming game library that currently handles texture management, cel animation (both snap and linear),  input handling, and has a premade protagonist class so you can get a character running in game with only a few lines of code and a textuer.

The second is Akuma’s quest,  a personal project full of lifted sprites that promises to be both terrible and blashphemous.  In the video you have the basic player character moving around with a teleport for fast movement and 2 attacks.  The background is a quick parallax hack that I plan to replace with a well thought out implementation for the library.

One thing I’ve learned from this so far is that I really should have included a play duration parameter when you submit an animation to the animation manager, relying on the animation to just play perfectly without any sort of time comparison doesnt seem to work very well.

It became apparent this map had some serious bottlenecking issues so I completely redid the red side of the map opening the path to the main area from one tight route to 4 routes. Blues side was also opened up considerably.

This map was also changed from 5 flags to 3 flags. I really look forward to playing the new version.